Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host job in Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio, and I love all things tech. Though. I may just need to come up with a new tagline, y'all, because these episodes are really going to take it out of me, because it's time to look back on some of the biggest tech stories of the past year. Now, there is no question that one was another rough one in a series of rough years. The COVID nineteen pandemic and the emergence of variants like Delta and Omicron have meant that the tough conditions we found ourselves in during have continued. And so that's going to weave in and out of a lot of the stories we will be covering over the next couple of episodes. And a lot happened, so there will be several episodes. Also, a lot of this is going to extend beyond tech in some ways, but tech played a critical part in these stories. So one really big story has been how tech companies like Apple, Google, and Meta Slash, Facebook plus others have announced, postponed, and in some cases indefinitely delayed a return to the office. We've seen companies make these announcements several times throughout one only to have to backtrack, like sometimes a few days or a few weeks or a month or two later, as things totally failed to get better. Maybe all the optimism in the tech sector is a little bit on the naive side. I think a lot of people start thinking, Hey, just because we can seemingly do anything with tech means that we can seemingly overcome any obstacle. Isn't necessarily true see also paraos. But lots of companies originally planned a return to the office, or at least a partial return in which corporate employees were expected to come in at least a few days out of each week. Uh And a lot of that started in the late summer or early fall of one. But then the Delta variant of COVID nineteen changed things as Delta proved to be more easily transmissible than other variants of COVID. And then you started to hear plans of late fall or early winter being the time to return, and a lot of those have changed yet again. At the moment, plans generally look at a January twenty twenty two return. Google had planned to come back to the office for January ten, but recently executives sent out an email indicating that employees would not be required to comply and that the company will reassess those plans early in the new year. Meta slash Facebook is aiming for a return to office by January thirty one, but has also offered a deferral program two employees who can choose to push back their their return date two between three and five months, So we might be looking at the middle of twenty two, assuming things are better by then, which based on the last year, it's tough to make those kinds of assumptions. Apple, which had aimed to get employees back in offices in early February of next year, has now released a statement that all return plans are currently on hold and that the return date is yet to be determined. The pandemic has really driven home the fact that making firm plans is just really hard to do. The rise of new variants requires changes in game plans. Meanwhile, employees are becoming accustomed to being able to work from wherever they happen to be, whether that's at home or on the road or whatever. So we're seeing a trend of employees expressing reluctance to go back to an office for lots of different reasons, ranging from convenience to health and safety, to promoting a different approach to you know, work life balance and uh. One other big bonus to working remotely is that employees don't necessarily have to live within commuting distance to their office. So for employees who work at companies that are located in really expensive markets like the San Francisco area, this means they could potentially move away from San Francisco and still work at that company. They're just doing so remotely, and they can end up living in a place that has a much lower cost of living, and that can mean that they can afford a larger home or more creature comforts, or put stuff towards savings. Plus they might be dealing with a lot less hassle like city traffic. Some employees have pushed back pretty hard against any move to return to offices, at least pushing back against making it mandatory. There have been numerous discussions about whether being in an office is actually that important to you know, getting work done. Um, there's some studies that seem to suggest that we actually get more work done at home, but things like innovation and forming bonds with coworkers really suffers when we are not in the same place at the same time. So there are these conflicting thoughts about what it means to do work and productivity and the benefit of doing work at home versus in the office. These are big conversations that are continuing to move forward, not just in tech, but we're seeing it play out a lot in the text sphere in particular. Now. Whether we're shifting toward a parliament approach to a hybrid work strategy where people at least work partly from home or remotely, that's hard to say right now, but it's certainly seems as though a lot of companies are going to have trouble convincing employees to come back to the office on a regular basis. It may turn out the companies that don't offer a hybrid or work from home approach, we'll find it more difficult to attract and retain talent. And that's a big deal in the tech sector, right Like if it turns out that company A offers employees the chance to work from wherever they happen to be and still get all of their compensation and benefits and company B doesn't. You're gonna see migrations from company B to company A. I mean that just that's kind of how it works in the tech sector in particular. And then we also have to look at another side of this, all that empty office space. Apple infamously spent around five billion dollars that's billion with a B and eight years of work to build their their quote unquote spaceship campus that opened in seventeen and it's got like seven cafes and a hundred thousand square foot fitness center, it's got a thousand person theater, tons of office space, so understandably having it mostly empty has got to be a source of frustration and pain for Apple executives. Also, it's really hard to keep an eye on what's going on when your employees aren't like forced to be right there at the office. It's also really hard to intimidate employees with your presence if you can't be there. So I'm not saying that that's necessarily Apple's modus operandi, but I'm not not saying it either. So we've seen office occupancy dropped below you know, between twenty five and across the United States of what it was pre pandemic for most of the last two years. Now in some cities like San Francisco, that occupancy rate is actually lower, it's below fifteen percent. There's still a trend in construction, so there's still like a trend of building out new office space that's still happening. So this raises the question who the heck is going to be in all those office spaces moving forward. We haven't seen companies abandoned their lease agreements on MOSS. It's not like companies are saying, well, no need for us to have offices anymore, We're all gonna work from home, so let's get rid of those. That hasn't really happened, at least not on a big scale. We have seen some companies start to sublease some of their space, so we might see some companies start to kind of slim down as far as office space goes. They might reduce the amount of office space that they maintain, especially if they go to a hybrid approach where not all employees will be in the office on every day, so people might end up using shared employee spaces and thus you don't need as many individual desk as you would if everybody were there for every day. That's a possibility, but it's still too early to really say that that's the future of work. I expect we're going to see a lot more innovation and products that target the hybrid or work from home models in two We've already seen some of those emerge. Uh, and we've also seen companies like Slack and Zoom pivot a little bit to target that use case more so not necessarily developing a lot of products specifically geared towards that, but rather hey, this this tool is also good if you aren't in the office, that kind of thing. So I wouldn't be surprised to see more of that introduced next year. Another pandemic issue that started in and is going strong today is the disruption of the supply chain. Now, this also goes well beyond just tech. We're seeing it affect everything. Heck, I see it at restaurants where they say, hey, we may not have everything that's on the menu because of supply chain issues. Um. So, supply chains are for pretty much every sector are affected by this, but the tech space has been hit really hard by it. Now we've all heard about the semiconductor shortage, which has affected everything from video game consoles to vehicles. And shortages mean that it's really hard to find stuff like say a PS five or It also means that car dealerships have less inventory than what they typically have, and what they do have ends up being way more expensive. Also means that some car manufacturers are having to scale back on features and options that they had introduced a few years ago because now they just don't have the chips to continue offering those features. You know that's BMW has done that with a couple of its features, where things that you could have purchased a couple of years ago now were no longer available because they the company simply doesn't have the chips to make those those components. So rather than go without a car at all, the new ones just have fewer features than older ones. That's a trend most companies don't like to follow. Companies like Intel are working hard to expand production for semiconductors and microchips. They're planning out new manufacturing facilities all around the world, including within the United States, but those plans are going to take a few years to come to fruition, and in the meantime, we've still got this shortage to deal with. Intel's CEO has expressed doubt that the shortage will end before three at the earliest, so we've got another year of this, at least according to the CEO of Intel. There are other leaders in tech who have slightly more optimistic prognoses, but um, I'm not sure that those are realistic. I hope they are. I'm just I'm not feeling it. Even after building out new facilities, we still have issues with the supply chain. So one of the really big problems with the pandemic has been how port and shipping operations have been affected. The pandemic has pulled back the curtain on how much we depend upon a relatively small number of professionals to keep the supply chain moving, and when that gets disrupted, you have delays and bottlenecks and sort of domino effects, and stuff starts to pile up at one port while waiting to get loaded onto a ship, and then the ship ends up getting in a bottleneck waiting to dock at another port that's already backed up. It becomes this sort of cascading effect across the entire industry, and of course, the supply chain issue wasn't helped when in March of this year, the cargo vessel named ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal. So for about a week six days actually, the vessel was blocking a key passage for cargo ships, and by a key passage, I mean nearly a third of all container ship track thick passes through the Suez Canal. Now, the Suez Canal Authority took possession of the ship once it was finally dislodged, and they held it for several months, finally releasing it in July after demanding nearly one billion dollars in fines. That amount was later reduced to around fifty million dollars. And um, you know, if you've ever been stuck in bumper to bumper traffic on a highway and you finally get to a section that mysteriously clears up and there's no obvious cause for what made the traffic jam happen in the first place, then you've had some experience with bottleneck issues. They can and do clear up, but it's not instantaneous, and even as one element gets some breathing room, others are lagging behind, so we're likely to continue feeling the effects of the supply chain disruption for some time, and not just in semiconductors. This also, by the way, effects pricing, which means we consumers start to really feel the pinch, as I'm sure all of you out there listening have seen in some way or another, whether it's in food prices, coffee prices, fuel prices, electronics, all of these things, we're all kind of feeling it in different ways. On a related note, one trend we saw increase in one was in bought activity, specifically bots. That is, these automated scripts that are designed to purchase certain goods um like like video game consoles, you know, high value goods that are in high demand. Now, the whole purpose of these bots is just to corner a market on whatever high end good they're focusing on, and then resell those goods at crazy markups on sites like eBay. So gamers out there who are desperate for a new console might find that the only option available to them is to go and pay through the nose at you know, eBay or some other resales site. Essentially, it's scalping. It's the same approach that you see with people who scalp tickets. So the practice inspired several US politicians, all of whom are Democrats, to reintroduce a piece of legislation called the Stopping the grinch Bots Act. This would make the use of automated tools to bypass online retail security measures uh in the effort to purchase and resell products and services illegal. It was just it would become against the law, and it would give authority to the Federal Trade Commission or f TC to enforce this law. Lawmakers introduced a similar measure in two thousand eighteen, but it's stalled out in committees and never really went to vote. And there's also a Stop the Grinch Act proposed by the Senator from Utah. That one actually is looking to alleviate some of the congestion within the supply chain, you know, the stuff that we were talking about a moment ago, at least within the United States, to help alleviate some of those issues. Of course, you know, it wouldn't necessarily fixed stuff overseas, which is part of the problem. We're talking about global problems, so local solutions are kind of only a band aid, but it would still be you know, a step toward that. However, that's a different act, so it gets a bit confusing because there's a Stop the grinch Bots Act and a Stopping the Grinch Act, so they have similar names. Um, but there are two different things. Something else that didn't originate in one but it cranked into a higher gear was the spread of misinformation. Now that's going to be a running theme in a lot of this episode. But before I get into all of that, let's take a quick break. All right, misinformation. Um, there's a lot to cover here, but when it comes to misinformation one, I mean, I've kind of feel like Marlon Brando and The Wild One when he's asked like what are you rebelling against? He's like, what have you got? Well, in this case, it would be you know, what do you have to say about misinformation? And a well, how much time do you have? Because uh, we could literally do a week's worth of episodes about misinformation just in one. But I'll try and keep it somewhat succinct, you know, I'll try to to keep all of that in this episode. I'm sure some of it will spill out as I talk about other other stories later this week. Um, Okay, A lot of the misinformation is focused on the pandemic from folks proclaiming that they knew with absolute certainty that the origins of the virus were from this one place or this other place, without actually providing any evidence to that. You know, they're just claiming it. Or there were those who were proclaiming vaccines to be harmful or even a tool that governments were using to try and control or track populations. And then there were just the right denials that there's even a pandemic going on in the first place, that that COVID itself is a hoax. The fact that several high profile deniers have subsequently died after contracting COVID doesn't seem to squash the spread of that dangerous misinformation, those lies, which again crazy, right, you have people who are saying COVID's not real, then they die of COVID, but the people that they've told COVID's not real are still saying COVID's not real. Listen, I also wish COVID weren't real. But you know, if if if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. And that's just not the case. As for the tech angle, well, as we all know, a lot of these messages spread via social networking platforms like Facebook, and we're going to talk so much about Facebook within the context of one. Volumes have been written recently about how Facebook's algorithm has played a part in elevating messages that spread harmful misinformation and how that ends up reinforcing falsehoods. It amplifies the message, and it convinces people to do stupid stuff like denounced vaccines or defy mask orders and more. And I figure any reasonable person has to be left wondering how many people have died because of those kinds of messages. And keep in mind, the folks who die are not necessarily the same ones who have bought into the lie. Right. The folks who die might be friends or family, or loved ones or co workers, or even just strangers who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, under the wrong circumstances and they caught COVID as a result. This is why I keep harping on this. I know I sound like a broken record, but I'm not going to stop. I don't want anyone to die. But even if I were super cynical, that if I were one of those people who saying this is Darwinian right, the idea that the people who deny it are the ones who are dying off it will it's a problem that takes care of itself. I can't think that way because that's just writing people's lives off, and that's fundamentally wrong to me. I cannot be that person. But even if I were, I would still have to acknowledge that it's not just the ignorant and the misled who are suffering here due to misinformation campaigns. It's everyone. Now. Some of the messaging spread in claim that vaccines could do anything from magnetize you to introduce some sort of tracking device into your body. It didn't matter that folks pointed out that those relies like they would show that no, there's no such thing that magnets, No, that's not happening, or that all you have to do is own a smartphone and that device alone is tracking everywhere you go and everything you do. There's no need to inject a tracker, and you you're already a willing participant in an ecosystem that's tracking you all the time. None of that matters when it comes to stopping misinformation. The best way to stop misinformation really besides you know, sitting people down and having one on ones and really getting to it is not allowing for that amplification and that rapid spread in the first place. All right, Uh, but not all the misinformation had to do just with COVID. We will touch back on that. There was something else that happened in one where misinformation played a pivotal role, and let's get to it. I mean, it feels like it happened a billion years ago to me, But it was on January six, twenty one, when there was a nearly successful insurrection in the United States. That is the date when a group of violent individuals stormed the US capital with the goal of interfering with the ratification of the twenty twenty election. Now, Congress was in the process of what is usually a pretty ceremonial event where the states present and ratify their elector results and the winner of the most recent election is made official. Everyone knows who the winner is already, by the way, because everyone already knows the outcome of the election, but this is the process that officially recognizes the winner. The rioters on January six, encouraged by then President Donald Trump, were on a mission to disrupt this process at any cost, with some going so far as to advocate for the capture and execution of the then Vice President Mike Pence, because it was Pence's ceremonial duty to recognize the results, and he was not going to overturn the recognized results despite what Trump wanted him to do. So his followers, Trump followers, we're saying, Okay, let's kill the vice president. A truly horridonous series of crazy, irrational thoughts right now, y'all. This story is so outrageous that it is hard to get my mind wrapped around it. And perhaps even more outrageous is how so much of the United States has just kind of accepted this as it's, you know, just a thing that happened. It's bonkers to me. But let's get back to the tech. Investigators looking into the January six riots suspected that a lot of planning for the event was carried out on various social network platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and at the time, parlor or parlay. I'm gonna call it parlor. This story continues to play out today. By the way, there was a finding in the FBI released in August of this year that said that they found very little evidence that there was a lot of planning going on on social networks at the time leading up to the January six riots, But then subsequently there have been others who have come for and said no, we totally use social networks to help plan this stuff out. So it's the story that has gone back and forth many times throughout um. But there are still people who are calling out for platforms to be held accountable for amplifying misinformation campaigns that led to civil unrest and violence, including the deaths of five people. Some have been held more to account than others, so Parlor, for instance, had a pretty rough go of it. Early in the year. The site, which promoted itself as a place where freedom of speech is valued above everything else, was mostly known as being the home for far right conservatives and conspiracy theorists. Parlor's site depended upon Amazon Web Services for for hosting, and in the wake of the January six insurrection, Google and Apple both were moved the Parlor app from their respective stores, and a short time later Amazon removed Parlor from a WS and the site went dark. Parlor subsequently saw its CEO, John Matt's, fired and replaced first by Mark Meckler and then by George Farmer. The site returned to service in mid February, having moved from AWS to a company called Epic, although it had lost all posts that had been sent before the takedown, so nothing from the earlier era of Parlor still existed. So the site is still around today, though reportedly not nearly as popular as it was leading up to the twenty twenty election, A lot of people just migrated to other platforms instead. As for other sites such as you know, Facebook and Twitter, much of one and YouTube too, I should say, but Much of One has featured investigations into and statements from those various site and services regarding to what extent they might or might not have played as part of the January six attack on the Capitol. And I guess that's as good a place for us to start talking about Facebook in is any Because good Gully is there a lot to talk about. In fact, there's so much to talk about that I suspect it's going to take up probably the rest of this episode. So this is also going to involve some jumping around because I tried originally to kind of sketch this out in a strictly chronological retelling of Facebook's year, but that was too messy, it was too tangled up. And that's largely because a ton of stuff really that really applies to the year that Facebook has had actually goes back several years, but it only became public knowledge late this year when Francis Hogan, who was a former product manager at Facebook, came forward with thousands of internal Facebook document and shared them with authorities and with journalists. And those documents prompted hundreds of questions that lots of different people want answered, and Facebook, or as the company is now known, Meta, has slowly kind of been answering them, to varying degrees of satisfaction. Some of the revelations that tied directly into that January sixth event. For example, leading up to the twenty election, Facebook had an internal group within the company called the Civic Integrity Group, and the purpose of this group was to monitor issues like misinformation relating to elections and politics. Now, you could probably make a pretty decent argument that this group was not capable of handling that task. Now, I don't mean that the people who worked within the Civic Integrity Group were inept or anything like that. Rather, what I mean is that the scope of the problem I think was well beyond their capabilities. It's just such a huge issue. Also, you had problems with Facebook executives who were kind of counteracting some of the suggestions that people had to make changes that could potentially reduce Facebook's uh role in amplifying this information. But setting all that aside, Hogan told a U. S. Senate subcommittee that Facebook dissolved the Civic Integrity Team shortly after the election. Now, Facebook reps have since said that they didn't dissolve the Civic Integrity team. Instead, they merged it with a larger Central Integrity team, So they say Cecivic Integrity didn't really go away, it just became part of something bigger than itself, and the idea was to use the experience that the Civic Integrity Team had to a larger scope. However, the concern that US lawmakers have is that this movement Facebook was even less prepared to deal with the surge in rhetoric that preceded the January six riots earlier this year. So, in other words, the timing of the decision to dissolve or rather merge Civic Integrity with another group may have been a contributing factor that there weren't as many eyeballs on the issue out of critical time as there should have been. Perhaps the spread of election misinformation, you know, the whole stop the steel nonsense, drove more people towards extremism, which in turn added fuel to the folks who ultimately stormed the capital on January six. Now I'm writing this and recording this on December twenty, two, thousand twenty one, and it was just today that Engadget published a piece about this very thing. So nearly a full year has passed since that riot, and we're still, you know, writing about discoveries made, uh leading up to the riot, igor Bonifaceic and I apologize for butchering your name, Igore. He wrote the piece, and he rightly points out that while there's a lot of outrage being expressed about this, there's not a lot of actual, you know, action being done about it. And and part of that is because while both Democrats and Republicans have an act to grind with Facebook, the two parties fundamentally disagree on the nature of that acts and how to grind it. I'll explain more after we take this quick break. All right, I've left off talking about how there's a general feeling that Facebook needs to be called to task, but there's a fundamental difference in ideology over why and how. So there's another ongoing story that really was playing out in UH and it's one that's not really supported by facts, but it's still important because there were consequences. And it's that there's the this narrative that Facebook and some other social networks have a bias against conservative voices and therefore have a tendency to suppress those voices, that these entities are working to silence the conservative perspective. Those who argue this like to point out stuff that you know, like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube eventually banned Donald Trump's accounts with those services, mostly in the wake of the January six riots and the perpetuation of election fraud claims, claims that are wholly unsupported by actual evidence. See The platforms under intense pressure began flagging posts that contained unsupported allegations and they tagged them as misinformation, so alerting people, hey, the claim was being made in this post are not supported by facts. That's essentially what they were doing, saying, you know, essentially, don't don't necessarily believe what you're reading here. Now that had prompted some conservatives to argue that the platforms have a bias. But you know, just a word on this. See, if your claim is not supported by actual evidence, it doesn't matter how loudly you want to shout it. It's still misinformation. And if a site has a policy against the spread of misinformation, that means you are violating the policy by trying to spread it. And you know, just because you want something to be true doesn't make it true. Trust me, I know this because otherwise I would be a bazillionaire because I want that to be true anyway, the narrative you know that social networks are biased against conservatives and are actively suppressing conservative speech. That has played into other stories with face Book. Some of those internal documents revealed that Facebook executives discouraged teams from clamping down on misinformation campaigns or making tweaks to Facebook's algorithm to avoid amplifying those claims, because they were concerned that if they made those changes, it would add fuel to the fire and give conservatives more quote unquote proof that the platform had an anti conservative bias. Never mind that some of these posts were getting amplified by the algorithm, such as posts that included hateful rhetoric targeting vulnerable populations ranging from ethnic minorities to the transgender community. These were all violating Facebook's own rules, right, Facebook has actual rules about this. The posts were definitely and definitively violating those rules, and yet they were being amplified by Facebook's algorithm because they were driving engagement. So the desire to avoid looking like a biased platform in the executive's minds outweighed any desire to avoid spreading harm. And yeah, this is borne out by some of those internal documents that Hogan provided, So we've actually seen the emails that the story plays out in. But wait, there's more. One of the early stories prompted by Hogan's whistle blowing activities focused on Instagram and the possibility that Instagram could be harming people, particularly young women, and that worse, folks on Instagram are fully aware of this and yet continue to make things worse. And the news broke right around the time that we started hearing about a plan that would see an Instagram app targeting young users, like those younger than the age of thirteen. Not a great look. So this internal document cited some research that you know, appeared to link a decline in some users sell image or their mental health and their use of Instagram, you know, saying that there appears to be some sort of link between the two. Now Immediately, lawmakers in the US showed concern, and I think we all pretty much intuitively feel that overuse of platforms like Instagram are probably harmful because the platform really promotes an unrealistic view of people's lives. Right if you spend any time on Instagram and you start scrolling through it, you're likely to see posts of really attractive people appearing to live out fantasy lives in incredible settings, and it's hard not to feel inferior by comparison. But this internal research seemed to show that this wasn't a bug in Instagram, It's a feature, and that Instagram, far from being ignorant of this effect, was well aware and was still pursuing efforts to expand its user base to even younger people. Now Facebook slash Instagram would try to refute this, saying that the research only represents a tiny amount of information and that these interpretations are wrong, and also that the studies involved a very small sample size. But that also prompts discussions about you know, how the company is under Meta operate with a lack of transparency, and that's saying this is just a tiny bit of information isn't really a good argument because the company hasn't bothered to show anything of the big picture that could actually contradict the conclusions people have made based upon the quote unquote limited information that they've had access to. So, you know it, it's kind of like when you you're you're a kid and you're playing a game like Cops and Robbers and you say, bang, I shot you and the other kids is no, you didn't. It's kind of like what Facebook saying. It's like that, you know, they're saying this is the study shows you know it's harmful, So no, it doesn't. Um, well, that's not really a good refutation. I would say I could probably do a very full episode or even a series of episodes about the awful stories linked to Facebook and Meta for this year, but instead, I'm going to limit myself to a few highlights. So keep in mind, I'm going to cover some stuff, some more stuff about Facebook before we close out this episode. But it's a drop in the bucket compared to all the different stories that came out this past year about that company. So there were concerns about misinformation that obviously extend well beyond US politics. I mentioned COVID nineteen earlier. Uh, there were a lot of concerns about Facebook's role in spreading and amplifying misinformation about COVID nineteen. In fact, some people going so far as to say that Facebook's role, uh, it was actually leading to people getting sick and dying. I mean, the United States President Joe Biden said as much. He said the platform was quote killing people end quote. Now later he backtracked a little bit, back pedaled and clarified himself and said what he meant was that the misinformation is what is killing people, not Facebook itself. However, when Facebook's algorithm promotes misinformation because misinformation drives engagement, and as I've said many many times, that is the end goal of Facebook. It's keeping as many folks on Facebook for as long as possible in order to serve as many ads as possible. Doesn't really care what the content is, as long as it keeps people there. Well, then tomato, tomato, right. I mean, if that's the goal, is just keeping people there, and if the thing that keeps people there is misinformation, and if the misinformation is what is leading to people getting sick and dying, I don't think it's that big of a stretch to actually say something like, hey, Facebook, you're killing people because it you know, it doesn't really matter the semantics of that. It ultimately of Facebook's playing a part in the ampleification and distribution of misinformation, and that misinformation is killing people. You know, the logic concludes, right, Well, then there's the story of the Rohinga in Myanmar. So the Rohinga people are Muslim and they are also the target of a genocidal campaign in Myanmar and have been for a few years. Anti Rohinga posts flourished on Facebook in Myanmar um, some of which were posted by the government itself, and hate speech circulated frequently on the platform, and it fueled the government's campaign to wipe out an entire people. Now, some survivors have brought a pair of class action lawsuits against Meta Slash Facebook, claiming that Facebook's actions exacerbated a deadly situation Myanmar, and they are seeking a hundred fifty billion dollars in damages as a result. Now that's a fairly new story, so it hasn't played out yet they spoke the company itself. As I've mentioned a couple of times here, it officially rebranded as Meta in October, in reference to the concept of a metaverse. But I've covered that fairly recently, so we're not going to dwell on it here except to say that the metaverse as folks usually think of it, is probably pretty far off the tech just eight there yet folks, and the rebranding prompted a lot of cynics to suggest that the timing was more about Facebook trying to make it harder for folks to criticize the company or to link Meta the company to Facebook the platform. I don't necessarily think that's the case. If it is the case, I don't think it's working very well. And discussions continue around the world about the possibility of breaking Meta up into smaller companies to make Meta divest itself of things like Instagram and WhatsApp Meta slash. Facebook has been in the spotlight during several talks about anti competitive practices. We haven't seen much action on that front, and there are plenty of folks who are skeptical that if Meta ever did break up, which is already unlikely. According to these people, that if it did break up, it wouldn't change very much. That's entirely possible. It's outside my realm of expertise, so I can't really comment on it. But yeah, that's uh, that's kind of what I wanted to wrap up with Facebook in one. Again, there's a lot more to say. Those internal documents, they go so far and so deep, and we still only have, you know, people like me, We've I've only seen a fraction of what is actually there. Uh, goodness knows what else is there that could lead to some pretty tough conversations around Facebook and its role in various social ills and the amplification of those. All right, um, you know what, I've got a few minutes. Let's go ahead and talk about one other thing before we conclude, and that'll be n f T S. I mean, can I interest you in n f T Uh That there's what we also refer to as a non fungible token, and it tells you it's the product of the future, and and by product, I mean it's digital code linked to a digital wallet, and arguably it don't mean much else. But never mind that. Look at this shiny n f T and by y'all, so Yeah, n f t s, we're huge in one, or at least they got a ton of attention early in one. Now, to be clear, n f t s predate one. It's not like they were suddenly invented this year. But I think it's safe to say that a lot of us, including myself, hadn't really heard about them before this year. So let's just get to it. What the heck is an n f T and what's all the fuss about? Well, I like to call n f t s the equivalent of a digital receipt. It's proof of ownership over some digital product. That product could be an MP three file, it could be a video, it could be a piece of digital artwork. It could even be a tweet or just a line of code. There are things that are hard to quote unquote own in the traditional sense in the digital world, Like you can't go out and purchase the original all your base are belonged to us meme and then hang it in your den, for example. It's not like a physical piece of art where there's one single original work of it and then lots of copies. It's a digital thing, right, Folks can replicate and alter it to their hearts. Content, and there's no way to differentiate a copy from the original. However, and n f T can represent a specific instance of a piece of digital information, and it can show that that instance belongs to someone specific. So n f T s are of these digital receipts, and they exist on top of the Ethereum blockchain, the cryptocurrency Ethereum. Now that means each transaction of an n f T is part of the blockchain record. So just by referencing the ledger for Ethereum, you can see who owns what. So I can actually look at that ledger and say, oh, hey, look, Josh Clark owns the n f T for the original all your base meme. He doesn't. That's just an example, or at least he doesn't to my knowledge. But that's just an example. But what does that mean in practical terms? That is harder to say, because while you've got proof that you have ownership of that particular piece of digital work, it doesn't change the fact that the digital item is, you know, digital and thus replicable and such. There's proof that you own it, and you can always sell or trade that proof of ownership to someone else, and that transaction will then enter the chain Ledger to show that it has in fact changed hands, and there's been you know, a lot of that. There's also a lot of speculation around n f T s, the idea that these are things that will increase in value. So we've seen a lot of investors speculation, but a lot of those values haven't really held over time. There's also this thought that n f t s are going to become more important in the future with a metaverse. The idea here is that you could purchase n f t s that represent ownership of certain digital goods, and that in theory, these digital goods will be able to exist across multiple virtual environments within the metaverse. So if you bought, say a really cool avatar design in one virtual environment, and you have the n f T for it, you could in theory port that over to other digital environments. So to use a video game analogy, imagine you're playing a game like war Zone and you purchase a skin in the game to make your character look like I don't know, the ghost face killer in the screen movies, because that actually exists in the war Zone game war Zone. If you're not familiar first person shooter game and uh so, yeah, you can buy a skin that makes you look like the killer from the screen movies. Then you decide, Hey, I want to start playing Minecraft, but I also would love to use the skin I bought in war Zone in Minecraft, so that if you see me in Minecraft, I'm still wearing the same skin that I would be wearing in war Zone. So no matter what game I'm in, you can tell it's me because I'm wearing that skin. However, you know we bought the skin in war Zone. That means that you know we bought it in a game that has no connection to Minecraft, so you can't just poured it over right. Well, the metaverse, if it ever actually comes to pass, is likely to consist of multiple virtual environments that are created and maintained by different companies and groups. Navigating from world to world will require a lot of platform support, so the ideas that n f t s could play a small part in this, providing proof that a person has the right to use certain designs as they navigate throughout the metaverse and pass from environment to environment. However, that doesn't mean it's actually going to happen. I mean, imagine if you could pour over your skin from war Zone to Minecraft, let's say that there actually was that capability. War Zone uses fairly realistic graphics, like the people in war Zone look like people. Minecraft is very cartoony and blocking, so a war Zone skin would look very different when realized in Minecraft, and you would have to have some way to deal with that to actually make it work within the two very different environments. So what I'm saying is that while n f T s could theoretically play a part in the metaverse, it will require a ton of cooperation behind the scenes. So it's not like it's a foregone conclusion. Like, even even as companies like Nike get into the n f T game and they start offering up virtual versions of Nikes as n f T s, it doesn't mean that, should the metaverse actually become a thing, that you'll be able to purchase a specific style of Nikes as an n f T and wear it throughout all the metaverse, unless it's something that's all self contained by one company, in which case I would argue it's not really a metaverse at all, But that's an episode for another time. Anyway, the n f T craze really kind of hit a peak in the early part of one and of course you still hear about them now, but I feel like a lot of folks, apart from the evangelists who are hoping to get rich quick off n f t s, have kind of cooled off of them for now, Like people don't seem to be quite as jazzed about it as when they were really being pushed in say like March of this year. Okay, we've gone on pretty long. We're gonna wrap this up now. We are going to continue to do a few more episodes about some of the tech stories of one because obviously a lot of other stuff has happened. So when we return later this week, we will keep on going until my psyche cracks under all the things that have happened over the last year. Like I said, years, these days feel like they've lasted an eternity and at the same time like they're over in an instant. It's it's a weird paradox where I think, oh gosh, that happened this year. I could have sworn that was like five years ago too. Oh wow, I can't believe the years over already. Um, time is funny, y'all. All right, Well, if you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff. Please let me know. Reach out to me on Twitter. It's the best place to find me. The handle for the show is text stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. 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